Bad Mandolin Haiku

I've been whiling away the time checking in on a message board called Mandolin Cafe: http://www.mandolincafe.net (as some of you know, I'm an aspiring mandolin player). One of the threads on the cafe is mandolin-inspire Haiku-- here are some of my posts:

A bird in the hand
Is better than no mando
Must ignore the noise

(I have a "loaner" mandolin which is noisy and poor-- frustrating)

Sun won't be back soon
Cold and dark, so dark and cold
Mando warms the soul

Oh the stars twinkle
Chill air penetrates the coat
Inside for practice

Music of the spheres
Astronomy inspires me
Write a mando song

Such extreme darkness
Star flicker like a pinhole
Warm and light inside

Hogging the thread now
No one else comes out to play
I plink on alone



In answer to your question: yes, I do have a lot of time on my hands!

Astronomy, word for the week

Hi All,

Well, it's getting seriously dark now. It's not quite pitch dark all the time, but we can see stars pretty much 24/7. There is an odd quality to the night sky here that I've never experienced in the northern hemisphere... bright stars seem to flash in colors in ways that I've never seen. It's called scintillation, or twinkling, but it's much more pronounced here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintillation_%28astronomy%29). If you look out at Sirius, it appears to be a bright flash of white, followed by a bright flash of red, then blue. I suppose this is accounted for by the cold, dry air, but it really is different. Big stars look like psychedelic beacons. The air is so clean, and so dry, that more stars are visible, and it seems (to me) that the brightest stars (betelgeuse, sirius, canopus, rigel...) are much brighter and more "twinkly" than I've ever seen them. We have been very fortunate in having some major Iridium flares lately (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_flare). Some of you may have seen them without thinking twice about it, but they are particulary dramatic here. Iridium satellites are always facing the sun, and at certain times they "flare" or show a bright reflection to folks on the ground. We, with time on our hands, note when Iridium flares are going to happen, using tools like this (http://www.wikihow.com/Find-an-Iridium-Flare) to determine when and where they will be happening. You can go outside at the proscribed Iridium flare time, and see a bright streak across the sky.

I use a really cool tool called SkyGlobe, which is free to whomever would like to download it: (http://www.sidewalkastronomy.com/skyglobe.html). You can input your coodinates, and see the whole sky as it appears from your position. This is really cool, because you can note a bright planet or star in the sky and use SkyGlobe to figure out what it is. It is especially helpful here, because the heavenly bodies don't move in paterns I'm familiar with. The moon is up for two weeks and down for two weeks-- totally different than what I'm familiar with.

It's so different here. You would probably never be able to see the stars at all in a big city-- we are immersed in darkness and starlight.

I've been reading a lot lately, and keeping track of words I've never heard of-- here are the words of the week: Vulpine (foxlike), and Argot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argot).

Cheese,

Lee

AHT Tour

This Thursday the Kiwis had an open house for the yanks. They let us come over and see the work the Antarctic Heritage Trust (AHT) have been doing (http://heritage-antarctica.org/aht.htm). They are working to conserve the artifacts that were left behind by Antarctic explorers at the beginning of the twentieth century. There is actually quite a bit of stuff in those huts, and some of it is in remarkably good shape. The conservators, Carla, Lizzie, Therese, and Susanne, have a nice blog at: http://piclib.nhm.ac.uk/antarctica/. Ironically, Lizzie is the only Kiwi in the group. Therese and Carla are Canadian, and Susanne is from Virginia. They were very gracious in answering our questions, and they let us look at some cool artifacts. There were some jars of gooseberries that looked almost edible. There all sorts of cool broken pots and things, as well as some food containers that looked almost new. You can see a webcam of Scott Base at http://www.antarcticanz.govt.nz/education/2568.

Smurf Fire

Well, it's been a pretty eventful week. On Monday morning we had a town safety meeting on fire prevention, where we watched videos of some of the big building fires we've had here at McMurdo. After the safety meeting I went up to T-Site (a facility on top of a hill here where there are a lot of radio transmitters) with my boss, Mark. On the way down, I said to my boss "look, you can see the Smurf Hut from here". The smurf hut is a small, blue warm-up shack that the fleet operations folks use on various projects-- they just drag it around behind their equipment, for a nice place to get warm. It was pretty posh-- it had a microwave, computer with wireless internet access, a nice couch, a phone... you get the idea. It was ironic that I happened to notice the lights from the hut from the hilltop, because it turns out that about that time, it was catching on fire. In my office we have a radio console that monitors all the frequencies in town-- we're among the first to hear about it when something happens. About ten o'clock we heard the fire dispatcher announce that the Smurf Hut was on fire. Antz went to get a long lens, and I went up to the Crary lab library (http://www.nsf.gov/od/opp/support/crarylab.jsp) to watch the fire through a spotting scope. The hut was out at the Pegasus runway on the ice shelf, several miles from McMurdo, so it was just an orange blur on the horizon. That picture is also a pretty good representation of how dark it is these days-- it was probably taken around noon. Since the ice is white, things look a lot brighter than they ordinarily would. The sun never gets anywhere near the horizon any more, and it's pitch dark for about twenty hours a day. There was a buzz around town-- the Smurf Hut drama was more exciting than anything that had happened in a while. The hut had a 500 gallon and a 200 gallon fuel tank (both full of jet fuel), so it burned pretty bright for quite a while. We chided the station manager for being a jinx. The last time he held an "all hands" safety meeting, the fleet operations folks dropped a bulldozer through the ice. They went out to get it, and dropped the rescuing dozer through the ice, too! The search and rescue team went out to help, but they got off-course in a blizzard, and rolled the Hagglunds vehicle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYm5USbSt8c) they were driving. They had to spend the night in a small mountain tent, in the raging blizzard. This time, the safety meeting topic was fire, and guess what? We told the station manager to please not have any more safety meetings, lest someone get hurt.

Trivia

Yesterday was the third Scott Base trivia night. My team is now 3-0 for the season. The prizes have been deteriorating, however. The first and second times we won real Kiwi ice cream, but they just gave us a bunch of gummi bears or something last night. The format is this: there are teams of 3-6 members; each team gets three forms with 25 blanks each. The emcee reads off the 75 questions, and the team does the best they can to come up with the answers. Whoever has the most correct answers wins. The competition was pretty fierce, and a lot of the questions were very tough. This one had us perplexed: "If your travelling companions are ghosts and empty sockets, what is your destination?". The answer is Graceland. Lyrics of the Paul Simon song, I guess. Never would've guessed that one in a million years. Anyway, it was good to get out of McMurdo for a while, and shake the cobwebs out of the old memory bank. The aurora pictures above were taken from right outside my dorm room last Sunday night. We've been having some really nice ones lately-- it's unusual to be able to see them this well over the town's lights. (Photos by coworker Antz Powell-- see http://www.frozensouth.com/)

Last Sunset

(This was a "travelogue" e-mail sent out on April 25, 2008)

Hi All,

Well, today was the big day. The sun set for the last time, or maybe I should say it rose for the last time. Tuesday was the last day that the full disk of the sun came up above the horizon, and today was the last time any portion of it showed. The lay of the land here prevents us from seeing the sun at sunset (mountains in the way), but it can be seen from the Pegasus runway facility (where the last flight took off). Here's a picture of me, at about 11AM yesterday at Pegasus. This is pretty typical of the light conditions we are having these days, with a lot of cool blue and purple bands in the sky. If I look cold, it's no mistake. My glasses were completely frozen over. I had just been on top of one of the airport buildings, removing an antenna, and my breath, deflected by my neck gaiter, was frosting up my glasses. It was about -10F out, with about 30mph winds. Brrr. The other photo is the actual sunset event at about 2:30 this afternoon. This is an important time of year for us, emotionally and otherwise-- going into winter at the bottom of the earth!

L.

PS: I think my coworker "photoshopped" the moon in on that picture!

Darkness, Links

(This was a "travelogue" e-mail, sent out on May 2, 2008)

Hi All,

Well, as you can imagine it’s getting quite dark and cold down here these days. The last sunset was almost a week ago, and the most we get is a bit of twilight in the middle of the day. It’s okay, though, I’m kind of looking forward to the darkness. It hasn’t affected me much mood-wise, except for a touch of insomnia. There is a light room here in the main galley building, in case the darkness gets really old. It’s just a vacant dorm room with about ten extra fluorescent fixtures added. I think they use full-spectrum bulbs, too. There is also a greenhouse on station, which I haven’t had a chance to check out yet on this tour. Very strange weather lately—blowing mist at well below zero. Yesterday’s low was -17F, with a low wind chill of -45F. That’s not any worse than weather we were having six weeks ago, but there was a lot of moisture in the air, which formed hoar frost on everything, and felt extra chilly against exposed skin. I drove out to the Pegasus runway, on the ice shelf to troubleshoot a data network yesterday. The road is flagged with bamboo flags—at times we could only see three or four of them at a time. Found some interesting links for y’all to peruse, in case all the warmth and light in your lives gets to be a grind. First, you can read a nice article about my coworker, Antz Powell, in our newspaper, the Antarctic Sun: http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contentHandler.cfm?id=1402. You can view the paper in general, including back issues at: http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/ . Another interesting blog/site developed by a McMurdo local (fellow contractor) is Big Dead Place: http://www.bigdeadplace.com/. He makes some rather controversial and insightful observations about the bureaucracy behind the polar program. Warner Herzog did a documentary about life down here, called Encounters at the End of the World; you can see details at: http://encountersfilm.com/. I haven’t seen that one yet, but it sounds interesting. There is a review and some background information about that film posted on Big Dead Place. Another new film out is Ice People: http://www.icepeople.com/index.html. Haven’t seen that one yet, either, but I understand both films had some footage of McMurdo and our unique local population—most likely some folks I know. I’d like to hear back from you on these films and links, and any other you discover. There seems to be a lot of interest in the ice right now, and it’s fascinating to see it from this perspective.

Cheers,

Lee

("Frosty Bike" by Ken Klassy, a coworker. "Flags" picture not taken lately-- just to show what a flagged ice shelf road looks like.)